Exhibition · gdm (Galerie du Monde) · Hong Kong
gdm Hong Kong is honored to present Tang Chang: Into the Heart-Mind, the pioneering Thai artist’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Curated by Sheryl Gwee, the exhibition meditates on Tang Chang’s iridescent visions of being — in the world, and in existence — situating his radical oeuvre within the intertwined legacies of poetry, painting, and philosophy. - Tang Chang: Into the Heart-Mind is a meditation on the poet and painter Tang Chang’s iridescent visions of being — in the world, and in existence. Born into a working-class immigrant Chinese family in Thonburi, Bangkok, Tang Chang was a self-taught artist who went against the mainstream of Thai modern art, developing a distinctive, idiosyncratic personal idiom. His stylistic nonconformity, his diasporic status, his staunch anti-commercialism, and his eccentric persona meant that questions of place and positionality were never far from his life and work. From free-spirited, calligraphic renderings of the Chao Phraya River to dazzling, prismatic vignettes of the sun-drenched fields and narrow alleyways near his home, Tang Chang returned, time and again, to portrayals of his immediate environment — and where he stood in relation to it. This exhibition journeys into Chang’s depictions of place through the prism of Chinese painting aesthetics. “Into the Heart-Mind of the World” nods to a recurring image in the Zhuangzi which Tang Chang may well have encountered. Daoism, Buddhism, and Chinese painting were cornerstones in Chang’s worldview; in fact, he translated classics such as the Daodejing and Shitao’s Treatise on Painting into Thai. The core conceit of this exhibition is the heart-mind (xin) as a mirror, reflecting in its stillness the myriad things of the cosmos. To achieve the clarity of a sage is to attune one’s heart-mind to the Dao — the universal structure and flow that underpins everything in existence. This approach to cultivating the heart-mind — not just the logical “mind” as is typically understood…